Questions of media ethics address the way media practitioners – journalists, public relations (PR) representatives, bloggers, technical support staff – resolve various types of dilemmas they face, as well as the value judgments that media audiences make regarding media content and performance. What does it mean to be “responsible” as a media professional? How should
Mass communication’s impact has been shown at an individual level and in society at large, yet all mass communication must pass through the same narrow gateway before having these varied effects. Unless people receive mass communication through their eyes, ears, or touch, and cognitively process it, it is powerless. This is why researchers are interested
Media advocacy is the strategic use of mass media to support community organizing and to advance public policy that improves health. The purpose of media advocacy is to put pressure on policymakers by setting the agenda and shaping debate to include policy solutions in news coverage of health issues. Media advocacy equips people to become
Media specialists are responsible for placing advertisements that will reach targeted customers and get the best response from the market for the least amount of money. Within the media department, media planners gather information about the sizes and types of audiences that can be reached through each of the various media and about the cost
Sexism in the media relates to concerns about a range of gender inequalities – in content, employment, policy, decision-making, and ownership – that have been a major focus of women’s liberation movements throughout the world since the 1970s. Mass media matter to women everywhere. They play a central role in the formulation and dissemination of
Sexualization is a concept used in communication research, primarily by feminist and gender studies researchers, to describe an increasingly close link between media images of men, women, and inanimate objects and human sexuality. Historical portrayals of sexuality tended to focus on psychological characteristics such as passivity and domesticity for women, and aggression and work for
Women’s media genres include women’s magazines and romances in print media, the soap opera on television, and romantic comedy in film. They are not generally the corollary of men’s media but defined in contrast to general audience media such as newspapers or “family genres,” including situation comedies, quiz shows, and action series on television. In
Grassroots media are small-scale, developed by and accessible to members of a local community or group, and conceptualized as a key tool in the process of social change. They have developed out of concerns with problematic representations of women and other marginalized peoples in mainstream media, as well as limited access to the media and
Heterosexism “refers to the belief and expectation that everyone is or should be heterosexual” and the term “heteronormativity” equates heterosexual experience with human experience, in effect “render[ing] all other forms of human sexual expression pathological, deviant, invisible, unintelligible, or written out of existence” (Yep 2002, 167). Heteronormativity provides a larger context for understanding how heterosexism
The focus of this article is upon representations of masculinity in one medium only, television, while making it evident that the approach adopted could be applied equally well to newspapers, magazines, radio, and film. Three broad phases can be identified in the evolution of televisual masculinities, a term coined to reflect the breakup of the